Pope Who Has Stirred the World Caused Little Ado in Scandinavia

VADSTENA, Sweden —  In a gentle spring rain, this picture-book town dominated by a medieval castle offered a by-now familiar tableau Saturday. A few townspeople came with youngsters from across Scandinavia to pray with the Bishop of Rome. Most ignored him.

Thus ended, as it began, one of the most unusual of Pope John Paul II’s 42 trips abroad.

The familiar white-robed figure, whose mere presence has paralyzed cities around the world, caused scarcely a stir as he swept through five Nordic countries. No traffic jams, hardly any crowds, empty pews at Mass.

On the last day of a visit to Sweden, John Paul made the front page in one of Stockholm’s major morning newspaper’s--but Page 8 in the other one. Still, to hear the Pope’s aides tell it, nobody expected big crowds, and the visit didn’t turn on them.

“The visit exceeded expectations both in the Holy Father’s spiritual encounters with Catholic minorities and his ecumenical reception by leaders of the Lutheran Church,” said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro as the pontiff’s party returned to Rome on Saturday evening.

‘I Go to Bring the Gospel’

Neither, said the Pope himself, did numbers concern him. “I don’t go to attract the masses,” John Paul told reporters on his plane after a visit early in his tour with Iceland’s 1,800 Roman Catholics. “I go to bring the Gospel everywhere there are Catholics. I also go to those who are not Catholics, especially when there are Christians.”

For five countries, 10 days and 38 speeches, John Paul traveled through Nordic nations where people exhibit socialist indifference not only to his Roman Catholic Church but also to their own official Lutheran Church.

There are barely enough Catholics in all of Scandinavia to fill St. Peter’s Square--about 200,000 in all--and hardly enough practicing Lutherans to keep warm the rock-ribbed, Gothic-spired churches that are landmarks of most towns.

Even so, in the trip’s aftermath, Scandinavian Catholics and Lutherans alike can claim something to show for the papal passage. So, for that matter, can the awesomely organized and unfailingly polite Scandinavian governments that welcomed John Paul with more efficiency than affection.

Even some of those crass materialists the Pope likes to revile were left with fond memories.

Promotion for Seafood

“The Pope Sells Fish!” exalted a headline in Tromso, Norway, which is as close to the North Pole as any newspaper gets--or any Pope has ever been. Einar Sorensen, a Tromso exporter, had a particular pontifical perspective: “This is unique occasion for promoting the seafood industry.”

In Denmark, a brewery bought ads showing a papal skull cap on a table and you know who’s hand reaching for a cold beer.

“The papal visit is a marketing operation of the Catholic Church,” said the Finnish newspaper Kausan Uutiset. “Still, it is a better crusade than the one in 1160, when Swedish King Henry IX invaded to convert us to Christianity.”

Across the region, government leaders welcomed the Pope as a fellow crusader for human rights and social justice around the world.

There was less echo, public or private, for the Pope’s no-compromise Catholic teachings in countries that are among the most liberal in the world on issues of personal morality such as abortion, contraception and sexuality.

A columnist in Stockholm’s conservative Svenska Dagbladet complained that the Vatican reacts to critics of its ban against artificial birth control “as if they were attacking the very basis of Christianity.”

To his own minority church in Scandinavia, John Paul preached solidarity.

“Always remember that even the most isolated Catholics are not alone,” he said at one drizzly provincial outpost in Denmark. “The smallest of your communities in the north is still part of the universal church.”

Promise of Reunification

To Lutherans, John Paul promised eventual reunification of churches split in blood by the Reformation. Indeed, in the Vatican view, the audacity of the trip and its principle achievement lay in its ecumenical dimension.

Every day, John Paul met leaders of the Lutheran Church, which has 69 million members in 85 countries and bedrock roots in Scandinavia. Catholics and Lutherans have been at odds for nearly all of the time since Martin Luther’s 16th-Century revolt from a corrupt and venal Roman church.

“After 400 years of separation, time is needed for the process of reconciliation and healing to take place,” John Paul said in an ecumenical address at Uppsala University attended by 15 Lutheran bishops. “Not everything can be done at once, but we must do what we can today with hope for what may be possible tomorrow.”

Throughout, papal rhetoric was carefully couched for Lutheran sensibilities. His usual lofty titles like Supreme Pontiff and Vicar of Christ remained at home. In Scandinavia, John Paul was, simply, the Bishop of Rome.

In Denmark, where Lutheran bishops would not let him speak in an ecumenical meeting, the Pope sat in reverential silence.

If the Pope’s moral message was as rigid as ever, he was calculatingly more euphemistic in expressing it to members of a church that has no problem with contraception, divorce--or women priests.

Noting the papal gesture, the Stockholm paper Dagens Nyheter observed: “Whether he respects other people’s views, particularly Lutherans, is something to ponder. Unfortunately, he handles his own church in a roughshod way, but he has to approach other churches with much more humility.”

John Paul rules out common communion with the Lutherans and other Protestants until there is what he calls “a common faith.”

“The Pope has very clear ecumenical commitment, but he’s going too slow,” said Jonas Jonson, the Lutheran bishop of Strangnas, Sweden.